Solutions to Disease-Causing Toxins with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno

Dr. Cates: Welcome to the Spa Dr. Podcast. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Have you ever wondered why we’re seeing more rates of history problems like obesity, diabetes, ADHD, thyroid disease, and skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis?

Today’s guest has made some very interesting and well-researched connections between these and other health problems and something that is unavoidable today. My guest is Dr. Joseph Pizzorno. He has an impressive bio. Dr. Pizzorno is a world-leading authority on science-based natural medicine, a licensed naturopathic physician, educator, researcher, clinician and lecturer. He is founding president of the Naturopathic Medical School, Bastyr University; editor in chief of Integrative Medicine, a clinician’s journal; treasurer of the board of Institute for Functional Medicine; co-founder of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians; board member of American Herbal Pharmacopoeia; and on a number of science boards.

He was appointed by presidents Clinton and Bush to two prestigious commissions advising the U.S. government on how to integrate natural medicine into the health care system. He is a recipient of numerous awards and honors and author/coauthor of 12 books, including the bestselling Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, 2 million copies in six language, and the principal textbook in the field, The Textbook of Natural Medicine. His newest book, The Toxin Solution, is being released February, 2017, by Harper and Collins, and another textbook for physicians, Clinical Environmental Medicine, will be released in January of 2018. Wow, impressive, right?

On today’s podcast, if you haven’t already guessed it, we’re talking about toxins and how they impact your health. Don’t worry. We’re not going to just scare you about the toxins in your environment. Dr. Pizzorno shares some very practical tips on how you can do things on a budget even, and he shares why some detox and cleansing programs may actually do more harm than good. This is important to listen and watch, and some interesting patient cases of disease recovery that I think will surprise you and give you hope. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno.

Dr. Pizzorno, it’s so great to have you on my show.

Dr. Pizzorno:  Great to be chatting with you.

Dr. Cates:  You now have your 11th book. I know you’ve been busy writing a lot of books, and this one is about toxins. What inspired you to write this book?

Dr. Pizzorno:  That’s a good question. I’ve been involved in medicine now for about a half a century, first as a researcher in conventional medicine, then naturopathic student, then practitioner, then starting Bastyr University, and now lecturing, teaching, writing books and things like this. I’ve seen a lot of patients over a long period of time, and I’ve seen a change in why people are sick. In the past, when I first started practice, people were sick because of nutritional deficiencies, nutritional excesses and poor lifestyle, things like that, but something fundamentally has changed. Now people are being sick because of toxins. What’s happening is we’re getting toxins in water, in food, in air, environment, and in health and beauty aids. Now I see that these toxins have become the primary drivers of chronic disease in our society.

Dr. Cates:  Isn’t that amazing? People wonder why that is. You want to explain why that is?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes. The example I could give is diabetes, and I think that’s particularly relevant not just as a disease but also because of the impact it has on the skin. When you looked at the instances of diabetes when I was a student, half a century ago, it was one half of 1%, and now it’s 20 times and even 30 times more common. What happened? First we would think, as naturopathic doctors, people eat more sugar. It’s true people eat too much sugar, but if you look at the diabetes epidemic, it doesn’t correlate with the increased consumption of sugar. We started eating a lot more sugar, reaching a peak about 60 years ago, so this diabetes epidemic started way past that. We need to start looking at does the diabetes epidemic correlate with anything else. It turns out it correlates very, very well with the chemicals we’re releasing into our environment, into our food, into our health and beauty aids.

It turns out that, when you then look at these toxins, what might be a mechanism of action that would explain why they cause diabetes, it turns out they block the insulin receptor sites on the cells. What’s happening there is we have to get sugar into the cells in order for our cells to function properly, and our pancreas produces insulin to get sugar into the cells. If the cells aren’t responding to the signaling from the pancreas, the pancreas has to overproduce insulin in order to get that sugar into the cells. People call this insulin resistance, and the insulin resistance is coming, primarily, from the chemicals we’re being exposed to.

Our wonderful bodies, they adapt, produce more insulin, get more sugar into the cells, but when you put that extra stress on the pancreas, after a while, after you’ve done this 20, 30 years, now the pancreas starts to fail because you’ve overworked it. Pancreas starts to fail, and now we say a person got diabetes. It took them 20 to 30 years of basically exposing themselves to toxins before they got to the point of getting diabetes and their pancreas failing. It’s just from the environment; it’s everywhere.

For example, if you’re eating fish, for example, particularly fish that’s been farm grown, they’re high in a lot of chemicals. If you look at most of the foods in the environment, they have some level of DDT and PCBs because they’re there, and they’re getting absorbed all the time.

Dr. Cates:  In addition to diabetes, what other diseases are on the rise that are related to toxin exposure?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Boy, lots and lots and lots. How about ADHD in children? If you look at children in the top 10% of exposure to organophosphate pesticides, they have a doubling of ADHD compared to kids in the bottom 10% of exposure to these neurotoxic pesticides. Also if you look at the IQ of children, children born to women with the highest level of toxins, particularly organophosphate pesticides, they have a 7 point drop compared to children born to women with the lowest levels of chemical toxins.

I’ve been around for a while. You see my gray hair. I’ve been here for a while. I look around and say it looks like our society’s going crazy, and I think it is. If you look at what’s happening, we feed people food that’s been depleted in nutrients, so the vitamins and minerals that are necessary for the body to function properly, they’re not in the food. Not only that, but into the food, we put these herbicides and these pesticides and all these chemical toxins that are basically poisoning our bodies.

Dr. Cates:  Absolutely. It creates mental, emotional issues, focus issues, blood sugar issues, also immune and other endocrine problems, right?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes. The reason for that are still under development, but the scariest reasons I’ve heard so far, and there’s now some research to support it, is that, as we know, autoimmune disease means that we’re producing antibodies to our own body tissues. Now we’re not supposed to do that because, as we evolved in our mother’s uterus, we determined which proteins were necessary and appropriate, which weren’t, and we said we won’t hurt those proteins. What happens when you expose yourself to chemical toxins that then bind to normal body tissues and now change the antigenic nature of those tissues, now we start developing antibodies to our normal tissues because they’ve been bound to toxins. It’s very, very worrisome.

Dr. Cates:  Autoimmune disease is definitely on the rise. We’re seeing, for example, more Hashimoto’s, autoimmune thyroid disease. As far as skin issues, we certainly see a lot more psoriasis and other skin issues related to the immune system like eczema. We’re seeing more of that, especially children, really young children developing these.

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes.

Dr. Cates:  You think that this really play a role in all of that, right?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Absolutely. No question about it. Because whenever you disrupt the body’s metabolism, it causes everything to not work properly. You might say nobody’s actually looked at the correlation between arsenic exposure, for example, and acne. Nobody thinks much about that, but it turns out, with people who have a lot of exposure to arsenic, it impairs the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin, and so what happens is the cells get a little bit diabetic. They’re not getting quite enough sugar. They’re having trouble functioning properly. We do that to the skin cells. Now you have increased instances of acne. You say you only get arsenic toxicity when your spouse is trying to poison you. That used to happen a long time ago, but people don’t realize that 10% of the public water supplies in the U.S. have levels of arsenic high enough that are known to induce disease in humans. We’re being exposed to it all the time. You look at people who consume chicken. Chicken has arsenic added to it as a way of both protecting them from certain kinds of infections, but more importantly, it makes them grow faster and get plumper and have more white meat. The farmers like adding arsenic to the chicken. The same thing with rice, rice has high amounts of arsenic in it … I’m sorry, can have high amounts of arsenic in it depending upon what fertilizers were used and if the water supply it’s being grown on has arsenic in it.

Dr. Cates:  Wow. We’ve talked about arsenic, DDT, PCBs. What other chemicals? What other toxins in the environment are a particular concern?

Dr. Pizzorno:  The phthalates for sure, the phthalates. The phthalates are basically … You get them primarily two areas. One is when you’re exposed to plastic products. For example, if you’re taking a hot shower and you have a plastic curtain, and the hot water hits the plastic curtain. That plastic curtain is going to start emitting phthalates because phthalates help keep the plastic soft. They basically give up themselves to keep the plastic soft. When the phthalates are done, then the plastic’s hard, and you throw it away. The phthalates are endocrine disruptors, and they also block insulin receptor sites in the body.

In addition, we have health and beauty aids, so of course we want health and beauty aids because you want to stay as pretty and as handsome for as long as possible, which is fine. The problem is those things have fragrances in them, and those fragrances are solubilized and stabilized by the phthalates. When you put those lotions and potions on your skin, you’re putting phthalates, and those phthalates are disrupting your physiology.

Dr. Cates:  Absolutely. I talk to my followers about this a lot, about cutting out synthetic fragrance and personal care products because we do use a lot of fragrance. If people think about deodorants, not just perfume, but deodorants, shampoo, conditioner, makeups, moisturizers, all these different products that we use on a regular basis, most of these contain fragrance. Even some of the so-called natural ones still contain fragrance, which blows me away. Essential oils are a much healthier alternative.

Dr. Pizzorno:  I’m really glad you’re aware of that and you’re working to help people become more conscious of what they put on their skin and how to have healthy skin. There’s a study I like showing the students because I like showing graphs, and we’re not set up technically for me to show you that, but it looks at the amount of phthalates in the urine and blood of young men. They put them, for a two-week period of time, where they’re using no health and beauty aids whatsoever, and basically have no phthalates in their body. Then they add lotion for a few days. Then they add cologne. Then they add deodorant. Then they add mouthwash. They starting all the things people typically use. A person using all these health and beauty aids, which most people do, has 300 times, not 300%, 300 times as much phthalates in their body. The good news is that this is under our control. The bad news is people aren’t aware of it enough.

Dr. Cates:  Speaking of that, why is that most doctors aren’t talking about this?

Dr. Pizzorno:  I think there’s two reasons. Conventional medical doctors aren’t taught this, pure and simple. They’re simply not taught to think about toxicity. The second reason is something of an artifact in the research that was done on toxins. When researchers were aware of toxins, it was primarily in the area of industrial exposure. You typically have relatively high levels of exposure of a period of time, and it’d be pretty clear toxic effects. When you then say, how about the general population? The researchers said the general population is being exposed to much lower levels of these toxins, so nothing to worry about.

That makes some sense, but there are multiple problems with that. Number one is we’re not just being exposed to one toxin; we’re being exposed to hundreds of these toxins. It’s not just one plus one equals two; it’s one plus one equals three because, the more toxins we’re exposed to, the more damage we cause to our bodies and the more we start impairing our ability to detoxify. There’s another problem here, and that is, when we think about toxins like lead or arsenic, for example, we have a nice, simple, linear, dose-dependent relationship. That means, the more toxin, the more poisonous it is, the more obvious the problem is. Many of these chemical toxins have what are called curvilinear relationships where they’re really toxic at low dosages; for some reason at medium dosages they’re not very toxic; then high dosages they’re toxic again. You get a U-shaped curve. When researchers are trying to determine if something’s toxic, what they do is they expose a rat or a mouse to a small level of toxin. They expose sit to a large level of toxin to see if there’s a difference. If there’s not much difference, they say the toxin’s not important, and thereby the miss a lot of the toxic reactions.

Dr. Cates:  We’ve got interactions between the different chemicals too. That can occur in the body also. When we’re doing rodent studies, they have a limited lifetime. They’re not going to have the same kind of bioaccumulation that we do, right?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes, exactly. Also, rodents, because they’re scavenger animals, have much better detox in their livers than we do. The model we had available, the way of thinking about it, they weren’t right. The good news is … Let’s give a researcher by the name of [Deki Lee 00:14:56] in South Korea credit because she’s the first person who started doing more careful studies, looking at total chemical load, not individual chemical load. When we started looking at total chemical load, now we’re seeing all these disease correlations, all of these abnormal changes in the blood that then help explain why these toxins are so problematic.

When we talk about the heavy metals, this is an example of how public health has worked very well. If you look at the blood lead levels in Americans since lead was banned 40 years ago, our average blood levels have dropped about 90%. However, I’ve been noticing something, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it as well, and that is in [premenopausal 00:15:40] and [preendopausal 00:15:43] men and women, I’ve seen a lot of lead and mercury. I think what’s happening is, during their lifetimes, when they built up all their bone, there was a lot of lead in the environment. Now when they start going through menopausal times and they start losing bone, now all those metals are being released into circulation.

Dr. Cates:  Interesting. [Crosstalk 00:16:01] Yeah. I see a lot of patients in that age range, so I’m not sure who to compare it to, but that’s interesting. Let’s talk a bit about detoxification and detox programs because there are so many programs out there, detox programs. There are things online, supplements that you can order, all kind of stuff. Let’s talk about. What should people be looking for, stay away from? What’s the good stuff? What’s the bad stuff?

Dr. Pizzorno:  That is what my book is about. What I do with the book is I first tell people how toxins cause disease. Then I tell them where they come from and how to avoid them. Then I say, no, let’s not go on a detox program because, if your body’s saturated with toxins and your detoxification mechanisms are saturated and not working very well, simply releasing more toxins is not the way to go. You’re going to cause yourself more trouble. I say let’s go through an eight-week process to prepare your body for detoxification. The first two weeks is becoming really aware of where the toxins are coming from, and stop them coming in. No point in doing detox if you keep on adding them to your body.

The next two weeks I say let’s prepare your gut because it turns out a lot of the toxins come into our body through the gut because we have the wrong bacteria in our gut. Let’s get rid of the bad bacteria. Let’s get good bacteria and get the gut healed, have it functioning properly. Next we work on the liver because the liver has such a huge role to play for detoxification, and so many things we have done to damage the liver. Simple things like excess consumption of high-fructose corn syrup puts fat into the liver so the liver doesn’t work as well. We work on clean up the liver. Then the final two weeks, we then work on helping the kidneys function better. You may have noticed, as I have, is there’s quite a kidney failure epidemic going on. Now we have all these dialysis centers popping up all over the world or all over North America. We didn’t used to need to do dialysis because people’s kidneys didn’t use to fail. They fail because of all the chemical toxins.

Now once that’s all done, now we do a detox program. It’s fairly straightforward. I recommend, basically, four things. Number one is slight caloric restriction so we start breaking down those fat cells. Second, taking supplements to alkalinize the body. It turns out most people’s diets are really acid-forming, and that inhibits the body to get rid of many toxins. If we make it slightly more alkaline, it helps get rid of the toxins. The next thing I recommend very, very strongly is saunas with lots of fluids and lots of trace minerals because it turns out, if you actually measure what’s in the sweat when people are perspiring heavily, it’s full of metals and chemicals, things like this. It’s really toxic.

Finally, I recommend people dramatically increase the amount of fiber they’re consuming. The reason for that is very, very important. As we evolved as a species, we were consuming 100 to 150 grams of fiber a day, but now the average person consumes 15 grams of fiber a day. Why that’s important is because the main way we get rid of chemicals and metals is through the liver, and the liver dumps it into the gut. Now our bodies are expecting there to be fiber there when we’re dumping this stuff into the gut. If there’s no fiber there, there’s a process called enterohepatic recirculation, and we reabsorb those toxins back into the body. While we get rid of some of them, we get rid of dramatically more when we have people, basically, put more fiber into their diet, so it’s pretty straightforward.

Then in the last chapter, I say to people, now that we’ve got you in the process of getting these toxins out of your body, here’s how to live your life to be as toxin free as possible. I go through page after page of all these things we do, obvious things like eating organically-grown foods. That’s clear. Things like, if you do buy packaged food, try to buy a package in glass. If you have to buy a package in plastic, when you get home, put it in a glass container. Health and beauty aids, there’s an app I recommend. I have no commercial relationship, called Think Dirty. What you can do with that app is take a little picture of the barcode on your health and beauty aids, and it’ll tell you how toxic they are. There are a lot of things you can do to systematically go through everything you’re exposed to and make it as least toxic as possible.

Dr. Cates:  Thank you. Thanks for walking us through that because I think it’s important for people to realize that just taking a detox supplement or doing a weekend spa retreat where they have a detox program, it could be helpful, and it could be a place to start. At the same time, for some people, that can cause more harm than good, right?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes. There’s actually some research on that. Now it’s in extreme cases. The best one is in Yamada, Japan, where people were poisoned with mercury because they’re fishing downriver from an industry that was leaking mercury into the water. When they try and get the mercury out of people’s bodies, one of the things they did was fasting because fasting will get the mercury out more quickly. The problem is it was releasing the mercury more quickly than the body could get rid of it, and [it 00:21:08] resulted in a lot more brain damage for these people from the mercury. Let’s be smart about it. We need to get the toxins out, but let’s do it in a way where we’re not harming our body in the process.

Dr. Cates:  How do you feel about fasting? I know there are places that have popped up around the country and around the world where you go and you do a water fast or a juice fast. How do you feel about those? Are there certain people that it’s OK for and some people that should not do it until they’re healthier?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Great question. I have done water fasting with, literally, thousands of patients. I actually do a lot of water fasting, and if you do it properly, it is actually a very effective therapeutic agent. Notice I said do it properly, and so doing it properly means, number one, is you’re helping to determine the person’s toxic load. Nowadays, people are so much more toxic than they were when I was doing fasts in the past. I now recommend, if a person is going to do more than a one or two-day water fast, they probably should go to a facility that actually specializes in this so they can monitor them and make sure they don’t actually hurt themselves. I’m a great believer in fasting, but, at this point, it’s probably safer to do no more than a one-day water fast, unless you’re having some expert supervision.

Dr. Cates:  Maybe if people read your book and follow your problem, after they go through that, then it would be a great time probably to do a fast, as long as they’re getting through it and they feel good and they’re doing well. I would think that that would be a great prep for that. That’s what I have tried to tell my patients before because I have a juice fast that I will have my patients do, but I don’t recommend it for everybody. I know not everybody’s ready for that. Even the ones that are, I have them do a prep phase where they’re eating a lot of fiber and getting their get ready and their liver ready. I think it’s great for people to hear this because there’s so much information out there. Thanks for sharing that with us.

Let’s talk about some of the ways to live a low-toxin life. Once you have some support for your body, and also even before that, what are some ways we can reduce toxins?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Great question. Frankly, it’s something my wife and I have paid a lot of attention to the last about 30 years now. We built our own house about 20 years ago, and we designed in a whole-house, carbon block filter, so that’s not a cheap thing to do. It cost about $5,000 at the time. What that means is that all water coming to our house is first cleared of toxic metals and toxic chemicals. The reason that’s important is, while drinking water does have toxins in it that’ll get into your body, it’s much more efficient to get toxins into your body by inhaling them. Whenever you’re having a hot shower, all those volatile toxins are being released into the warm air, and you’re breathing it. First off, stop the toxins coming in any way you can.

Then we do things like, anybody walking into our house, we give them slippers because outside on that ground is all these pollutants that get into the dust, and you don’t want to track them into your house. Then we have air filters in the room of our house where we spend the most time, so kitchen, office, bedroom. We have filters to clean out the air as much as possible. Then we only eat organic-grown foods, and, as a matter of fact, we are growing more and more of our own food. I know that’s not possible for everybody, but even if you just have a little porch or you have a deck, you can always grow some of your own food.

I don’t if you’ve ever met a guy, Gaetano Morello, one of our naturopathic doctors in Vancouver, British Columbia. He and I were talking in Toronto at a conference about a year ago, and at dinner afterwards, he said, “You know, I notice that all of my old patients, they grow a bunch of their own food,” which I thought was a pretty interesting observation. Now he thought, by growing their own food, they’re getting bacteria from the soil, and that bacteria from the soil was making them healthier, which I think is probably true. I’m also thinking, if they’re growing their own food, they’re not putting poisonous chemicals on them, and they’re not storing them in plastic, and they’re eating them fresh, just much, much, much healthier.

The next thing is, how do you store food in your kitchen, in your pantry, and how do you prepare the food? If you prepare your food on Teflon and you cook at high temperatures, so not only are you releasing Teflon into your food, and those, what are called perfluorinated hydrocarbons, they have all kinds of problems, skin problems being one of them by the way. Also, when you cook food at high temperature, you damage many of the constituents of foods, and you create something called advanced glycated end-products, so these are called AGEs for short. These AGEs basically cause hardening of all tissues of your body because they cause cross-linking of the collagen. For example, if you look at how wrinkled a person’s skin is and how supple it is, it’s directly correlated with how much AGEs are in their body. It’s another way of staying young and pretty and nice skin; don’t put AGEs into your body. Anyway, so everything you can do to decrease exposure.

Dr. Cates:  Now you mentioned Teflon. A lot of times I think now the cookware says Teflon-free, but they’re still non-stick coated cookware. Is that safer, or is it the same issue?

Dr. Pizzorno:  If they’re using perfluorinated hydrocarbons, it’s probably just as big a problem. There are some things that are now using ceramic coatings, and these ceramic coatings look like they’re less problematic. I think that’s going to hold up, but the reality is we won’t know for sure until somebody’s actually tested them after they’ve been used for a while to see are the emitting anything into our foods. Stainless steel is one that we use, and when we stir fry our vegetables, we stir fry them in water, not oil. By stir frying them in oil, you don’t get the food so high temperature, so now it doesn’t cause the AGEs, and you’re also not damaging the oils. We’ll still add some oils back to it afterwards for taste purposes, but not for cooking purposes.

Dr. Cates:  Absolutely. I think those are all great tips, and I think there are things that we can all do. One of the concerns that people have, especially with buying organic produce, and you mentioned the water filtration system that you have, that it can be really expensive to make these kinds of changes. Do you have any suggestions for people on a budget?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Very good point. I’m sure you’re aware of the Environmental Working Group, and they have a website, EWG.org. They show which foods are the most contaminated, called the dirty dozen, but now it’s the dirty dozen plus two because they had to add kale to it because kale has high levels of organophosphate pesticides. Go to a restaurant. I’m going to be health conscious today; I’m going to have kale. You just ate the worst organophosphate source available at this time. Then they have what they call the clean 15. On the dirty dozen, either don’t eat them, or only eat them organically grown, whereas clean 15, it turns out either not a lot of pesticides are used in their production, or they just don’t tend to stick with the food in the process of harvesting, et cetera.

Dr. Cates:  Then as far as water filtration systems, there are different ones, right? I know that you mentioned you spent a lot of money on the one that you have, but I know I have a whole-house filtration system. It definitely didn’t cost that much. I can’t remember how much it was, but it was a lot less.

Dr. Pizzorno:  Good. Remember, I did this a while ago, before anybody was doing it, so it was more difficult to do.

Dr. Cates:  Even if people can just start with a countertop filter, a carbon filter, that’s going to help some for drinking water.

Dr. Pizzorno:  A lot of people use them for drinking water. Frankly, I don’t have any hard data on this, but I suspect it’d be efficacious if you put it on your shower because I think that inhalation is a much more efficient way to get toxins into the body.

Dr. Cates:  Absolutely. Those are great ideas. I just want to go back to kale for a second because I know that a lot of my patients like to drink juice and smoothies. They’ll put concentrated amounts of greens, and you mentioned kale being one of the most contaminated vegetables, and I imagine most juice bars are not buying organic greens. Anything you want to say about that?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yes. I think green drinks are a great idea. They have to be organic greens. If they’re not organic greens, folks, don’t do it because many of the greens, not just kale, they have these things added to them.

Dr. Cates:  That goes with the green powders and the supplements and things, that we want those to be organic.

Dr. Pizzorno:  Yeah. Make sure they’re organically grown. Also, we’ve taken dietary supplements, which I prescribe a lot of my patients, make sure you’re getting them from a company that does it properly. It means that they have to study every batch of raw materials, look to make sure they’re properly identified, proper dosage, and that they’re not contaminated. Many of the products that come out of China, they are heavily contaminated because China is so toxic. People don’t realize this, but over the 50% of the mercury released into the environment in the world comes from China, comes from coal burning in China. Not only are they releasing all the mercury in the air that goes all over the world, but they have a much higher concentration in China. Don’t be surprised, if you buy something from China, if it’s full of mercury.

Dr. Cates:  You’ve worked with patients on the protocol that you have. What are the results that people are getting?

Dr. Pizzorno:  Let me give you an example. One of the wealthiest women in Canada, the woman was 65 years old. She thought she was losing her mind, thought she was getting Alzheimer’s disease. She’s had memory problems. She was having problems with her skin. Her hair was falling out. She was fatigued all the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Went to an integrated medicine MD, determined that she had high levels of mercury and then did two years of chelation therapy. She got worse because the problem with IV chelation therapy is that it stirs things up. If you can’t get it out of the body, it just eventually makes things worse.

She came to see me in desperation, and what I did was I put her on a detox program I have for mercury. What that detox program is, number one, of course, eliminate all sources of mercury, but she’d already done that. What I did with her was I gave her, first off, N-acetylcysteine, or NEC for short. Now N-acetylcysteine is really useful for mercury because it binds to methylmercury. That’s the kind of mercury you get from fish, and it gets [found 00:32:05] through the urine. It also increases the production of glutathione, and glutathione helps cells get rid of the mercury and also helps the body get rid of the mercury through the liver.

Next I gave her fiber, so I gave her three grams of fiber, three times a day, as a way of binding to the toxins like mercury when they’re dumped by the liver into the gut. Then I gave her a drug called DMSA. Now it’s a relatively safe drug. I don’t give it in very high dosages, but I gave her 250 milligrams every third night. This is a very safe protocol for getting rid of mercury, but it’s also safe. One of the tradeoffs is you can do it fast and not safe, or you can do it slow and safe. I prefer slow and safe. We monitor mercury. It started out at 51, which I should know is way, way high because the max you want to find is five, and here her’s is 51. After six months, it was down to 15. Not only was it down to 15, but for the first time, her symptoms were starting to clear up.

Continue the program. Now she’s on it for a year. Her mercury’s down to seven, still more than we want, but now most of her symptoms are gone. A year and a half later, she was down to 3.5. All her symptoms were gone. She went from being afraid she was having dementia and her brain was going away to everything’s working fine. Her skin’s nice. She’s not losing hair, et cetera. It was all because of the mercury toxicity. I have so many patient stories I can tell you.

I’ll give you another example. This is a guy from Japan worth $3 billion. Now I like wealthy patients because I can do all these lab tests on them to figure out what’s going on. When I checked him, super high levels of mercury, super high levels of lead, and so I said, here’s my protocol to get rid of it. He didn’t do my protocol. Two years later, he had skin cancer and lost half his face. Now if he had done my protocol, would he have not gotten the skin cancer? I do know, by not doing my protocol, he undermined his body’s ability to protect itself. You’ve got to get these toxins out. They don’t do us any good.

Dr. Cates:  Absolutely. Can you give us one more patient story? Because I love hearing these.

Dr. Pizzorno:  I think you’ll enjoy this one. I have to be very careful I don’t do it in way the person’s identifiable. A young woman came to see me, and I do free care for some people low income, a college student, really struggling, acne, overweight, having a hard time maintaining a C average. She came to see me for her menstrual irregularity. I then started talking to her about her diet and what she’s doing and such. She wasn’t real receptive, but because she was broke and because I was doing this free care for her, she said, “OK. I’ll do this.” I put her on a whole foods diet, had her stop buying cheap foods. She liked buying notes because of the cheap form of calories. I said stop buying the junk food. All those lotions and potions you’re putting on your skin for that acne, why don’t you stop doing that, OK? How about if you go to the gym and work out a little bit and make yourself a little stronger?

Basically, I put her on … We’re naturopathic doctors, right? We put people on healthy diets, healthy lifestyles. I basically got the toxins out of her food, got the toxins off of her skin, got her working out, eating healthfully. The transformation of this young woman was stunning. After a year, she had lost 20 pounds, even though we weren’t trying to get her to lose weight, but she lost 20 pounds. Her skin totally cleared up, and she went from a struggling C student to an A student, and last I talked to her, she’s now in grad school getting her master’s degree. It was just transformational, and it wasn’t anything fancy. I didn’t give her any miracle drugs or miracle vitamins. I just taught her how to get toxins out of her body and get nutrients in. It’s quite transformative.

Dr. Cates:  That’s fantastic, and I’m sure you have many, many more stories like this. One question that people ask me often is, why isn’t the government doing more to protect us?

Dr. Pizzorno:  I think that’s a good question, and, unfortunately, the government we now have seems to be so involved in crony capitalism and excessive political posturing that it’s doing the wrong thing. I’ll say something that’s politically incorrect today, and I’ll give out the great example, global warming … oh, wait, we should call it climate change, right? This is an example of misdirected energies. It seems to be politically accepted by one particular political party, but the problem with the coal burning is not the carbon dioxide. Plants eat carbon dioxide, but the coal releases mercury, and mercury is a poison forever. I’m looking at what the government’s doing, even though they’re trying to help protect us, so much energy is going the wrong direction. The metals we’re releasing into the environment are a much bigger problem than the carbon dioxide, the chemicals we’re releasing into the environment from things like fracking. I think fracking’s fine, but if you’re going to use chemicals in the fracking process, those chemicals get into the water supply and into the air. You’ve got to do the fracking in a less toxic way. There’s all these things we’re doing that are just not smart. I don’t think we have to spend any more money in government on the environment; we just need to spend the money in the right ways.

Dr. Cates:  Very well put. I appreciate you saying that. Any last bit of information you want to share with us? I want to give you a chance to tell people about your book as well.

Dr. Pizzorno:  The books is called The Toxin Solution, and you can go to TheToxinSolution.com. At the time we’re having this conversation, you can preorder it, and it is released on February 21st. What I tried to do with this book is give people guidance on how to become healthy. As we talked about it, it’s where the toxins come from, how you prepare your body to get rid of the toxins, get rid of the toxins, and then live a toxin-free life. This is all based on naturopathic medicine philosophy and principles, but everything I recommend is all based on research. I have hundreds of references in my book showing people that the things I’m recommending, not only do they just conceptually make sense, there’s research to support them.

Dr. Cates:  Fantastic. I know that you are big into research. I know that’s always been a big thing for you, and I definitely believe there’s going to be a ton of research in your book. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m excited to read it and see. I highly recommend people get your book. I think it’s fantastic that you have this. All your other books have been amazing and such a great resource for natural medicine, really for the health of everyone. Its’ funny. Sometimes people say to me, you’re a naturopathic doctor. I have sister that’s into that. I’m thinking, it’s really common sense, this approach to medicine, and I hope that we can shift into this. People will shift into this idea. It’s a common sense approach to health care, and so I hope we have more and more people seeing naturopathic doctors and readings books such as your book that you have.

Dr. Pizzorno:  Thank you. Actually, let me add one more thing, as you were talking, that occurred to me. In class with students a couple of weeks ago, I looked at them and said … because they’re all young people, in their 20s. I looked up and said, “When I was in your seat half a century ago, I had to take this on faith because it just made sense to me. Eat real food; avoid toxins; get exercise; have loving relationships. It all makes sense, but there wasn’t really research support for it.” I said, “Now I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve watched what happens.”

As you may know, I’m an avid basketball player, so I’ve been playing the same game for now about 30 years, but I’m not playing with the same guys anymore because all the guys I used to play with, they didn’t take care of themselves. I noticed, when they hit about the age of 50 to 55, they started dropping like flies because, basically, their body was done. They weren’t taking care of themselves. After we’d play a game, you play two hours of full-court basketball, you’re really sore afterwards. What were they doing? They’re taking ibuprofen and things like that, which have the advantage of decreasing the pain, but they actually impaired the body’s ability to repair itself. In addition, they damaged their mitochondria. By age 50, they’re all done. They’re tired. Their bodies are broken, et cetera.

It’s not only that. Laura and I now look around, and we look at the people who are our age. Many of them are dead now. Not only are many of them dead now, but many of them now have chronic disease. We look at people in our own generation, and we’re saying, boy, I can tell you who took care of themselves and who didn’t because, the ones who took care of themselves, they’re doing great like we are. The ones who didn’t, they’re either dead or full of disease. This really counts. You have to start now, today.

Dr. Cates:  Joe, thank you for everything that you’re doing to continue to help educate people, all of this information so that we can all be healthier. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno. Wow, what a great amount of information he has shared. To find out more about Dr. Pizzorno, his new book on toxins and all the great information there, just go to my website. TheSpaDr.com. Go to the podcast page with his interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join the Spa Dr. community so you can get my newsletter. I also have information about my new book, Clean Skin from Within, is there. I also want to tell you about a special offer I’ve got going with my new book. Right now, for a limited time, you can get it for free. That’s right. You can get my book, Clean Skin from Within, for free. All we ask is that you pay the shipping and handling fee, and you can get it for free with the shipping and handling fee. Just go to TheSpaDr.com/BookOffer, and you can get all the information there. You’re also going to get a couple of great bonuses for free when you preorder the book. Again, this is only for a limited time. We can only offer this until March 15th when the book actually is published and comes out.

I also invite you to join me on social media. I’m on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, so join me. Join the conversation. Also, if you haven’t taken the skin quiz, I highly recommend you do it. It’s free, takes just a few moments to take the 10-question survey. Just go to TheSkinQuiz.com, and you’ll see the information there. Thanks for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. podcast.